The Dictator who Came in from the Cold

Syria's Bashar al-Assad didn’t set out to be a war criminal. He didn’t even set out to be president. He wanted to be an ophthalmologist, and he was finishing his residency at the esteemed Western Eye Hospital in London when his brother Bassel al-Assad, the heir to the Syrian presidency, died in a car crash en route to the Damascus International Airport for a flight to Germany.

Hafez al-Assad, the father of the two boys, who had assumed control of Syria in a coup in 1970, had groomed Bassel for leadership. Hafez had showered affection on Bassel and had trotted Bassel out at speaking engagements and other state functions so that the Syrian people would intuitively recognize Bassel as Hafez’s rightful successor.

Bassel was charismatic, and the Syrian propaganda machine pumped out material hailing him as “The Golden Knight.” Bassel was an accomplished commander, an equestrian, and he parachuted out of airplanes. He led a sybaritic lifestyle, a lifestyle marked by posh nightclubs and beautiful women and fast cars. His death undid years of carefully laid plans.

When Bassel’s Mercedes-Benz 500E crashed into a roundabout’s concrete edge on that foggy winter morning in 1994, and when Bassel’s head slammed against the metal frame separating the windshield from the window, the fate of the al-Assad regime and the fate of the Syrian people changed. Bassel, true to form, was not wearing his seat belt, and he died immediately. And immediately things changed.

Bashar was recalled from London, was anointed Syria’s future leader, and said goodbye to his past as a westerner. He renounced any desire to be an ophthalmologist.

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But why write about Syria? Why, when there are two consequential wars unfolding in Ukraine and Gaza, pay any attention to Syria? Syria hasn’t been relevant since 2013, or to use another form of dating increasingly favored by historians, Syria hasn’t been relevant since Taylor Swift’s relationship with Harry Styles (the Styles relationship falls between her flings with Connor Kennedy and Calvin Harris—there might have been other dalliances in between, but I’m sticking to the relationship timeline as set forth by Cosmopolitan).

Again, why write about Syria? Isn’t Syria no longer relevant? Questions like these are part of the problem. The conflict in Syria has always existed on the periphery. It’s always been relegated to the back pages, to weary conversations on foreign policy.

Western ignorance of and indifference to what has been happening in Syria has enabled Bashar al-Assad to massacre his own people. Because other threats and violence like Islamist extremism and Putin’s aggression in the Ukraine have constantly upstaged Syria in the Western press, al-Assad has been able to murder with impunity.

It’s a shame more attention wasn’t paid to Syria. Not only could lives have been spared, about half a million and counting (the majority being civilian), but perhaps the conflict in Ukraine could have turned out differently.

After Russia’s military intervened in the Syrian conflict in September 2015, Putin began using the country as a kind of laboratory in which he could refine some of the dastardly devices he would later use in Ukraine. In fact, Putin boasted about “having tested more than 200 weapons in Syria, including air-dropped incendiary munitions that burned their victims in Ghouta alive.” Syria became a staging ground for Putin, and he used it as an exotic runway on which he could exhibit and test “Russia’s arms systems and latest-model fighter jets.”

Putin’s entry into the conflict also coincided with a surge in unconventional and banned weapons like cluster munitions.

The New York Times’ Vivian Nereim notes, “The Russians have used some of the same military tactics used in Syria, such as sieges and starvation. The Syrian war offered other potential lessons for Mr. Putin, analysts said at the time, reinforcing that international norms could be violated without serious repercussions.”

Nereim’s comments echo what French foreign minister Lauren Fabius felt after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Fabius was certain that “Putin’s bold actions in Ukraine were the result of careful observation of how Obama responded to Bashar’s use of chemical weapons in Syria.” In other words, after the U.S. failed to punish Assad for his use of chemical weapons on the Syria governorate of Ghouta, Putin concluded that Western threats carried little weight. They were all bark and no bite.

Assad is typically represented as Iran's and Russia's puppet. They tug the strings, and he jerks his marionette arms. But it's possible that Iran, and especially Russia, learned from Assad. It's possible that Assad wasn't always the apprentice. Perhaps, Putin learned something from Assad's propaganda efforts, hacking campaigns, and barbarity. Some of the gruesome scenes from Bucha and other Ukrainian villages conjure up images of Assad's own massacres.

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On August 20th 2012, President Obama was asked if the U.S. would consider a military intervention for the safekeeping of chemical weapons in Syria. Obama, in an unscripted statement, asserted that the movement or use of chemical weapons would constitute a red line and that it would “change [his] calculus.” Later, Obama would double-down on this comment and reaffirm the red line.

In the early hours of August 21st 2013, Assad fired rockets filled with the chemical Sarin in Ghouta, a suburban region outside Damascus. Because the rockets didn’t carry incendiary warheads, they didn’t explode, and they made little noise. A resident compared the sound to the opening of a Pepsi bottle. The attack killed 1,429 people, including at least 426 children. Many died in their beds. Others, thinking that cellars and basements would offer safety, rushed underground. And to their own deaths. Sarin is heavier than air.

There was much back-and-forth between France and the United States as the West weighed potential counterstrikes. Ultimately, nothing was done. Having just pulled the U.S. out of Iraq, President Obama was not eager to embark on another protracted military operation in the Middle East. He deferred the decision to Congress.

President Obama was also concerned that Syrian forces would herd civilians into the military bases, and thus the U.S. would end up firing on innocent Syrians. And then there was the situation in Libya to consider. The U.S. and other Western forces had interceded on the Libyan opposition’s behalf. Gaddafi was ousted, but his removal had created new problems, and Libya was now a hotbed for extremism.

But the U.S. failed to act.

Under Putin’s orders, Syria agreed to cooperate with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to destroy much of their chemical-weapon arsenal and chemical-weapon-manufacturing facilities.

But Assad continued to use chemicals like chlorine on civilians (since 2013, there have been 300 reported chemical-weapon attacks). Russian-made MiG jets continued to scream through the skies and rain down devastation. Helicopters continued to drop barrel bombs, which are empty oil barrels loaded with a sinister concoction of TNT and steel rods and shrapnel and have a wicked tendency to tear down buildings and innocent civilians. Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Assad’s own ragtag troops continued to lay waste to Syria. Assad continued to arrest peaceful protestors and dissidents and subject them to the most barbaric torture.

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Assad targeted residential areas. He deliberately attacked hospitals and food supplies. He laid siege to different opposition-held territories and starved them into submission. Once the rebels surrendered, Assad’s forces would undertake “cleansing” operations, which involved the mass execution of civilians, rape of young girls and women, and the burning and looting of homes.

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In September 2015, Bashar’s grip on power was seriously weakened. The rebels were making inroads and gaining territory. Assad appealed to Putin for military aid. Putin, sensing an opportunity to challenge the U.S.’ hegemony in the Middle East and rewrite the global order, agreed. He supplied Assad with aircrafts and thousands of soldiers. The Wagner Group was deployed. Lacking air support and antiaircraft weapons, Syria’s resistance was hammered from the sky. The rebel fighters’ calls for weapons from the West fell on deaf ears. Both the U.S. and its allies were worried about supplying rebels with weapons only to find them eventually in the hands of Islamist extremists, something that had happened after they armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 80s. Instead, the U.S. supplied non-lethal aid like night-vision goggles, which offered rebel fighters little good in the face of Assad’s relentless onslaught.

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In Syria, Assad and Putin perfected their propaganda machines. The conflict gave them an opportunity to experiment with the truth, to observe just how much they might distort the facts. Assad labelled the opposition arrayed against him as extremists. To be sure, there were elements of extremism in some of the forces fighting against Assad—sometimes they were the ones doing the most effective fighting. The Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front was one such organization, but they constituted a minority of the opposition. Most of the opposition comprised forces that wanted reform and change, as well as defected soldiers who were disillusioned with Assad's depraved rule.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he pushed a similar narrative. Putin claimed that Russian forces were going into Ukraine to liberate the people from Nazi overlords.

It should also be noted that Assad deliberately fostered the very same extremism he claimed to be bent on exterminating. He released Islamist extremists from prison in early 2011, hoping to draw the minority religions—the targets of extremism—into his orbit. He also willingly relinquished Syrian military outposts to ISIS in Syria’s eastern half. Rebel forces were then compelled to fight both Assad and ISIS.

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Before Putin’s false narratives, before his outrageous lies, Bashar al-Assad demonstrated just how malleable the truth was. Once footage from the aftermath of the attack on Ghouta was released, Assad’s minister of information, Omran al-Zoubi, stated,

“The images and dialogue are all fabricated and maybe also prerecorded… The Syrian forces are conducting an operation in Ghouta… but with full respect to civilians and residential areas… These people are actors paid to do this silly stuff.”

Such a blatant dismissal of the facts rivals Putin at his mendacious best.

In February 2017, Amnesty International published a report that stated that the Assad regime had executed up to 13,000 people at its Saydnaya prison between September 2011 and December 2015.

“A majority of those killed were “opposition activists and protesters captured and tortured by the mukhabarat [secret police] and then referred to a military tribunal at Saydnaya. Mass hangings took place in the prison’s basement, usually on Mondays and Wednesdays, in what was described as an extermination policy.”

Assad denied the findings and told an American journalist that “you can forge anything these days…We are living in a fake news era.” Assad dismissed photographs of the corpses of the prisoners as the results of “Photoshop.”

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Assad made early forays into cyber-warfare. An Assad-regime hacking outfit called the Syrian Electronic Army took the New York Times website offline for twenty hours. They hijacked the Twitter accounts of news organizations like the Associated Press and Washington Post. They flooded the internet with pro-Bashar and anti-Obama statements. Bashar’s army of social media drones “promoted lies and fake news stories in order to negate and bury the truth that was emerging about the [Ghouta] attack.”

This served as prelude to the hacking campaign undertaken by Russia in 2016.

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When German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with Putin about Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Ghouta, Putin replied that attack was coordinated by the United States and that it was “part of an American-led conspiracy to justify action against Bashar.” This was an early and unmistakable sign that Putin’s psychology was more disturbed than the West had realized.

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It’s always easier to detect the seeds of future conflicts in hindsight. But Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons on civilians, to kill peaceful protestors, to target civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and clinics without any consequences from the West—this all must have altered Putin’s calculus.

President Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, said it best.

“It matters that nearly a hundred years ago, in direct response to the utter horror and inhumanity of World War I that the civilized world agreed that chemical weapons should never be used again. It matters because if we choose to live in a world where a thug and murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity, even after the United States and our allies said no, and then the world does nothing about it, there will be no end to… the dangers that will flow from those others who believe that they can do as they will.”

Right now, we are dealing with the consequences of inaction, of doing nothing. And after Syria’s return to the Arab League this past May following a twelve-year suspension for the regime’s brutal treatment of peaceful protestors, there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate Assad’s image. Assad’s return to the league was made possible thanks to a China-engineered thaw in relations between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Assad is a pariah no longer. Except for Qatar, the other members of the Arab League, each with its own dismal human rights record, have embraced Assad and welcomed his return.

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This past weekend, the Arab League gathered for an emergency summit in Riyadh to discuss the need for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and the humanitarian crisis affecting the people in Gaza. Assad, a man who raped his own country, was among those participating in the discussions on humanitarian aid and human rights.

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At the GOP debate last week, the candidates spoke of the formation of a new axis of evil, an unholy trinity between Russia and China and Iran. They spoke of this alliance against the backdrop of the conflicts in the Ukraine and Gaza. Neither they nor the moderators mentioned Syria. It’s important to understand that the bonds of this axis were forged in the crucible of Syria. It was in Syria that Assad, facing an uprising, sought succor first from Iran and Iran-proxy Hezbollah, and then from Russia. It was in Syria that Russian and Iranian and Hezbollah forces worked together to ground down Syrian opposition. China acted as an ally and played a critical albeit less direct role in vetoing any security council resolution that aimed to condemn or punish Assad.

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The instability we see in the Middle East and Europe and the world in general can be largely attributed to Bashar al-Assad. The fact that we don’t talk about him and that Syria's suffering has been forgotten by the West has been his crowning achievement.

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Assad is responsible for almost half a million deaths and over 100,000 disappearances. His war has touched off a refugee crisis. An estimated five million Syrian refugees have been displaced to neighboring countries and one million to Europe (mostly in Germany). Six million Syrians have been displaced within Syria.

This past March, the UN concluded that 15.3 million Syrians were in need of humanitarian assistance. In Syria, inflation is estimated to be over 100% and 90% of Syrians are believed to be living in poverty. The war in Syria is on-going.

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The West failed to take action when Assad used chemical weapons on civilians. It's now the West's duty to make sure that relations with Assad, despite the efforts of the Arab League, won't be normalized. A rapprochement with a brutal war criminal sets a dangerous precedent, one that would have dire consequences.